A Movie A Day: GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL (1957)We don’t matter, Kate. We haven’t mattered since the day we were born

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
I’m going to say upfront that this AMAD entry will be on the short side. I’ve had an unexpectedly busy day. Friends from out of town, birthday parties… all stuff that pulled me away from home (and my new purty TV)… and I was up way, way, way too late marveling at just how much better Blu-Rays look on a true 1080p set.
So, I’ve gotten little sleep and had a long busy day, capped off by my AMAD, following Burt Lancaster from yesterday’s amazing John Frankenheimer picture THE TRAIN to today’s GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL. I’m feeling extremely tired, so fair warning… this one will be short and sweet.

Directed by John (THE GREAT ESCAPE) Sturges this flick takes the incredibly well-known story of Wyatt Earp (Lancaster) and Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) and doesn’t really do anything new with it from today’s perspective, but I can’t tell how innovative it was at the time of release or how fresh the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral/Tombstone story was then.
The flick hits the right beats. Douglas plays Holliday as a drunk gambler with a bad cough and an even worse temper, Earp is a little more by the book, staunchly law & order, a more traditional… and most importantly, the imagery is there. The Earp brothers walking down empty streets, joined by Holliday being the most famous.
There is a deeper focus on character relationships than I remember in other Wyatt Earp stories, specifically Doc Holliday’s rocky and ill-fated relationship with Jo Van Fleet’s Kate Fisher.
Sturges did a good job directing this picture, but I will say it feels much longer than its 2 hours… or maybe that’s just because I’m tired.

But no matter what they get so much right that it’s hard to nitpick. Douglas is fantastic, and so is Lancaster, but in a much more one-note performance than we’ve seen over the past couple of films. His Earp is actually not all that interesting, but it’s a tribute to Lancaster’s charisma and likability as an actor that it came off at all.
You should also keep an eye out for some really interesting character actors who pop up, like Lee Van Cleef early on as a man gunning for Doc Holliday… he goes out way too easy for Lee Van Cleef, I have to say. There was a man’s man for you, incredibly young here, still a decade away from being immortalized by Leone.
John Ireland plays baddie outlaw Johnny Ringo, a young Dennis Hopper plays a young sibling of the main baddie clan, a year after appearing in GIANT, crazy-eyed Jack Elam is a gunslinger and a very young Bones McCoy, DeForest Kelley as a younger Earp brother.
Another big, big plus to this movie is a fantastic score by Dimitri Tiomkin and some good, if way, way over-used cowboy songs sung by Frankie Laine (who also sung the great opening to BLAZING SADDLES. The score is good, the opening song is great, but they soon get incredibly redundant, basically becoming a mini-recap after every big scene, telling us exactly what we just saw. Yeah, that got pretty damn annoying after a while.

This is an enjoyable movie, but honestly TOMBSTONE is a much greater retelling of this story and as much as I loved the nuance Kirk Douglas gave to Holliday, I just can’t shake Val Kilmer in the role.
Final Thoughts: I hope that wasn’t too half-assed, but I am falling asleep at the keyboard and need some sleep to be bright-eyed and busy-tailed in the morning. GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL is a fine movie, but not one that knocked me out. A solid 6.5-7 out of 10 type flick.

Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Sunday, November 23rd: MYSTERY STREET (1948)

Monday, November 24th: BORDER INCIDENT (1949)

Tuesday, November 25th: THE TIN STAR (1957)

Wednesday, November 26th: ON THE BEACH (1959)

Thursday, November 27th: TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH (1949)

Friday, November 28th: GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (1947)

Saturday, November 29th: PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950)

See you tomorrow for MYSTERY STREET, a review I promise to be full-on, following director John Sturges!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com

Last Train From Gun Hill, the western Sturges made after O.K. Corral. It doesn't touch Magnificent Seven, of course, but it's a great little forgotten western with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn that could use some play in this column.

Can't wait for your review on this one. Watched it once or twice and found it kind of annoying (how many bloody times do you need to sing Waltzing Matilda mate?!) but then I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and then saw the movie again and I got chills watching it (and suddenly Waltzing Matilda made sense). It's like On The Road To Australia - less violent but no less tragic.

I Walk Alone, a 194* Gangster/Film Noir where Lancaster is fresh out of prison and runs into trouble from his ex-partner Douglas. Scorsese talks about it on his Personal Journey Through American Film DVD. <p>
Good double feature with Panic in the Streets is the B rip off, The Killer That Stalked New York, with Evelyn Keyes.

How fresh was this story in the 50s? Well seeing how it had already been told definitively by John Ford a decade earlier, I'm guessing not very. Seriously, how has this discussion got this far and no one's mentioned My Darling Clementine? Ford actually met Earp in his early Hollywood days and got the story from him first hand. And victor Mature is a (surprisingly) great Doc Holliday.

While I must admit it is amazing that no one mentioned My Darling Clementine, and I will agree it is a great movie (in fact one of the greatest westerns ever) I don't think you can look at it as a very accurate depiction of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. I mean, yes he got the story from Earp himself, but Earp was not one of the most reliable sources.

I seem to remember that the title gunfight in this production had seemingly dozens of characters running in an out of buildings, crashing through windows, shooting people off of roofs, etc. TOMBSTONE suffered from the same big Hollywood shoot-'em-up mentality. Give me the gunfight from WYATT EARP any day of the week. Short and brutal is always more bad-ass than drawn-out and clean. And, as far as sprawling, multi-shooter Western gunfights go, the chaotic final fight in OPEN RANGE is the most bad-ass showdown there is. Why? Because, the fighters don't have time to aim their pistols when they're being shot at, and they miss a hell of a lot more than they actually hit.